Posts tagged ‘Woodlands’

Unlike most, I’ve welcomed the wet weather of recent weeks in southern England. In August, this means mushrooms. Hopefully not only an early burst in August but a good autumn clutch. ‘The coming of the fungi’ in autumn is an event in nature’s calendar that I would put in the same bracket as the first migrant willow warbler, swallow or swift, or the first butterfly. Autumn is a time of plenty. When mushrooms arrive en masse, we are witnessing a spectacle many millions of years old.

A weekend visit to family in Essex meant a chance to visit the famous Epping Forest. This woodland is very close to London and is owned by the City of London Corporation (other sites outside London in Surrey and Hertfordshire also belong to them. I think they do a very good job). The Forest shows the scars of this proximity to one of the world’s biggest cities, namely the M25. It was interesting talking to family recently who grew up locally and their reminiscences of putting ‘stop the M25’ posters up in their windows. Epping Forest is also prey to nature writers (guilty as charged, but not published) framing their own ego against this ancient wooded landscape. The Forest and its mycelia feature in Robert Macfarlane’s recent award-winning book Underland, a book from a writer I love reading and admire greatly. However, I must to admit to disappointment in the lighting of a fire in that book. Even more so when I saw a tent and a fire in the Forest when I visited. The two obviously are not linked, but having been an urban woodland warden where fires were lit both in ignorance and violence, it is hugely galling (no pun intended). Leave no trace people, seriously.

I mentally (and verbally) built up my visit to Epping Forest due to the rain throughout the week. The mushroom boom in my eyes (let’s call it that) was spilling out from every path and Epping Forest’s many visitors were tripping up over them. The early signs upon entering were not good. The ground was battered by recent rain and the sloping nature of the landscape had meant the soil was scarified by the heavy downpours. Mushrooms, washed away. The first wildlife encounter of any note was the above robberfly which I noticed out of the corner of my eye on the brim of my (it needs to go in the wash) sunhat. These predatory flies (not of humans) have had a good summer and I’ve seen more than I ever have before this year. #LifeGoals.

It was only getting near to Ambresbury Banks (Aims-bury) that the mushrooms were in any way ‘common’. A slug-munched Boletus edulis or cep lay prone at the trackside. Then, half eaten, I found this:

Moving my little camera around to the right angle, you would never know the cap on the other side was almost completely gone. This is a tawny grisette (Amanita fulva). This was probably the least photogenic specimen I’ve ever found, but with the green flow of woodland behind and a bit of bokeh, anyone can look good.

Cheered by the sight of a half-eaten mushroom I checked out the swampy dog-poo realm alongside a path. There I spied these beautiful white parachutes (Marasmius) in wet soil amongst bramble twigs. My books are telling me they are Marasmiellus candidus AND Delicatula integrella. A woman passing by on her Saturday jog asked what I was looking at. She said how much she loved spending time in the Forest and that she was moving away soon. She said how important is was for her to see the seasons changing and how different the trees were in different parts of the Forest.

She’s not wrong. The bizarre pollard areas near Ambresbury Banks are unique. Their pollarding stopped as a local practice some 150 years ago due to a wrangle of Acts of Parliament – who could lop what and where. They are of significance to the whole of Europe (ecosystems are European-wide, people). In some areas holly dominates and things get a lot darker.

In one of the those areas I found an oysterling (Crepidotus) on a twig and found a nice tree to perch it in for its close-up. The gills look like flames to me and not of the campfire kind. See the darkness of high canopy beech and holly understorey? Creepy. A deer was hiding away here.

Ambresbury Banks is always worth visiting. This is an ancient earthwork or Iron Age Hillfort, which was likely created by the pre-Roman (-AD43) inhabitants of Britain. Legend has it that Boudicca battled the Romans here in AD61 but people say that about so many hills in London, trust no one. Also for anyone espousing ‘Indigenous British’ as a phrase about themselves as a pedestal for their polticial views, those Britons who built Ambresbury Banks were probably the last group of people who could say that. It is now populated by ancient beech pollards which have no view on Brexit, other than that it may remove their Natura 2000 protections as a site of European Significance. But then again we may not have food and medicine by 1st November.

In all fungal seriousness there were actually a pleasant number of ‘shrooms around this Iron Age propaganda ditch. Spindle shank (Collybia fusipes) was bubbling up nicely at the roots of beech trees, likely nibbling away at their wood under the soil. Bridges of beech are likely to be built across those ancient earthworks in the decades that come, if you get my drift(wood).

For photography brittlegills (Russula) are one of the most annoying. I have seen grey squirrels pull them from the soil and chew their gills down like some turbo corn-on-the-cob eating contest. Slugs also love them. Thankfully for you I found this Russula largely un-squirreled with some pleasant bokeh to be had in the world above. I lit the gills with my phone torch.

Another sign that autumn is not actually here yet was the state of the Amanita mushrooms. Two years ago I found many, many of these beauties near Connaught Water in the holly woods (nope, not that Hollywood) and they were in the same state. If I’ve learned one thing from mushrooms it’s:

You can’t hurry poisonous fungi

There is no basis of fact in that. Not that it matters nowadays. Fake ‘shrooms.

When you see so many Amanitas pretending to be beech nuts, you know autumn is tickling your toes. Winter is snoring.

This cheery chap was reaching out from under a ghastly bit of deadwood to say good afternoon. I’m not sure of the species and it will require a bit of rifling through the field guides to get a general idea. Answers on a postcard in the comments box please.

A beautiful morning in Epping Forest but what did fungi teach me? If you just walked in and found everything you ever wanted in fungi terms there would be no fun and you wouldn’t learn anything. Also, appreciate every chance you have to spend time in these special places and try not to make a campfire. Next up: Autumn.

This is an expanded version of an article that was first published in London Wildlife Trust’s Wild London magazine

It’s a sound that stops many in their tracks, the rattling in the canopy of woods, parks and gardens. It’s a sound that brings in the new year, signs of spring breaking through as our own seasonal celebrations draw to an end. While we are still deep in recognising our need to rest in the midwinter, our wildlife is busy setting out its quest for new life. Britain has three species of woodpecker and in January we begin to hear the hammering, or drumming, of the great spotted, the sound of male birds marking new territories. It’s a bird that is becoming more and more familiar to us in London as its numbers increase.

Its favoured habitat is oak woodland with plenty of rotting branches, trunks and limbs in which to create a new hole each year, ample habitat for the biggest of our two Dendrocopos woodpeckers, the great spotted. Dendrocopos translates from Greek as ‘wood-striker’.

One thing I have noticed in suburban locations is the woodpecker drumming on TV aerials and receivers. One great spot I’ve seen has found the plastic box now employed to improve TV signals makes decent percussion. It’s a wonder that this hammering on hard surfaces doesn’t cause the birds injury, but evolution has equipped them with shock absorbers in the back of their skulls that cushion the blow. It’s not the same as banging your head against the wall.

There are four members of the woodpecker family deemed native to Britain, with one now classified as extinct as a breeding bird. That is the wryneck (Jynx torquilla), a bird that migrates from Africa each spring in small numbers still. In 1904 a wryneck nested on south-east London, what was thought by the observer to be one of the last nests in his time, in south-east London historically.

Another of our four species has declined at a rate that has baffled ornithologists. The lesser spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor) was noted in south London’s woods up until 2008. The odd autumnal record does crop up as the lesser spots are migratory, with one seen in 2015 in Brockwell Park in Lambeth.

Lesser spotted woodpecker

One possible theory for the decline of lesser spotted woodpeckers (above) relates to the rise of the great spot and the disappearance of starlings from London’s woods as a breeding bird. When starling numbers were higher in woods they provided more competition for great spots.

This gave more space for the lesser spots, being much smaller, about the size of a sparrow or starling. As starlings and their ruckus have left the woods, the great spots have increased in number as they have experienced less competition and adapted to the boom in garden bird food. Lesser spots require a smaller hole in a tree to nest and if a great spot chooses the nest they can make the hole bigger and the lesser spots are pushed out.

Lesser spotted woodpeckers, however, are not extinct like the wryneck as a breeding bird and they still have strongholds in the UK. The most important place for them is the New Forest, one of the mythical heartlands of ancient English woods. There the management of the woods has remained the same for centuries, pointing to another reason for the species’ decline elsewhere. British wildlife is under increasing pressure from development and the loss of available food due to wider intensified management of the countryside.

So the two factors which are most harming lesser spots, and starlings, too, are a lack of habitat and food. The loss of food is a loss of invertebrate life being driven by agricultural intensification and a tidying up of green spaces, loss of gardens and general overuse of harmful, residual pesticides. Another key change is the loss of old orchards, another traditional habitat disappearing in Britain, one of the lesser spot’s favoured habitats.

The other member of the British quintet, if including wryneck, is the green woodpecker (Picus viridis). Green woodpeckers are different to the spotted woodpeckers because they don’t hammer to mark their territories but instead call, what was known for centuries as ‘yaffling’. An old name for a green woodpecker is ‘yaffler’. It’s a call that can be heard most clearly in woods and parks with mature trees, where green woodpeckers also nest.

Oak woodland is a key habitat for woodpeckers

The call has a prehistoric feel about it, echoing deep into woodland, as the reverberation recedes. Greens differ again from the spotted woodpeckers because of their feeding habits, spending their time searching for ant colonies in woods and lawns. Naturally grassy sports pitches with a surrounding area of mature trees are a good place to find the birds. They lie low, shooting their long tongues down into nests to find food. It’s something you are very unlikely ever to see a great spotted woodpecker do.

For those curious and unsatisfied by the array of woodpeckers in London, remember that you will have to travel to continental Europe to find a greater diversity. Arriving in France you could meet with the biggest of all the European woodpeckers, the black woodpecker and heading as far as the great ancient woods of the Czech Republic, Poland or Romania, you can find as many as seven species. In British terms, the health of London’s woodpeckers reflect the state of the nation’s.

In April 2014 I visited the Bavarian Forest, a landscape which, combined with the neighbouring Bohemian Forest in Czechia is the largest area of protected woodland in Europe. The Bavarian Forest or Bayerischer Wald, contains populations of lynx. In recent decades an outbreak of the spruce bark-beetle has devastated areas of conifer woodland. It is a remnant of the once vast Hercynian Forest.

The Bavarian Forest, Germany, April 2014

They burst from the slabs of granite like stony pillars. They are beech trees and they mask the view on all sides. They are giants imprisoning me on the path to Groβer Falkenstein. They are elephant limbs, they are victims of metaphor. Beneath them is a sea of copper and golden brown. The wind moves through last year’s fallen leaves and I think for a moment that it may be the sound of footsteps. Chunks of shining granite and smatterings of plant life break the spell of the endless leaves. Wood anemones, even this high, have opened their petals to the sun breaking through these yet leafing beeches.

I’ve travelled here over land and left the anemones coming towards the end of their annual cycle in London’s oldest woods. We have that in common, then, both species attempting to move through the woods of western Europe. Back home, I do my best to help them. Amidst my minute understanding of German and the feeling of isolation that brings as a lone traveller, I do get a sense of home from these white buttercups. Wood anemone is not the only plant to have made it up here, wood sorrel, one of the most common wildflowers in the Bavarian Forest, sits with its flower heads drooping, its leaves like the club from a pack of cards, still to be revealed. I continue on, touched by vertiginous thoughts as the path slaloms through the beeches, the mountainside steepening.

A stream channels its music to my ear and the familiar spread of marsh marigold, a buttercup that I’ve planted in the marshy woods back home and dunked into my parents’ enamel sink-pond by the kitchen window. Yesterday I feared hypothermia in the snow around Zwiesel’s mountains but today I’m in a t-shirt and a large orange butterfly bursts across the stream. It drives around me in a circle, never taking a moment to rest, it must still be too cold for it to pause too long. Butterflies need a body temperature of about 32 degrees to fly and forage properly. They often hold their wings out to trap hot air and warm their hairy bodies. It’s not as simple a manner of basking as it may seem. I think it’s a silver-washed fritillary.

I have come to the continent with a sense of something missing from England’s wildlife. This butterfly is one that was more common in England but has declined. It is a butterfly of woodland rides, laying its eggs on dog violets, plants which grow in my front garden and in our local woods. Last August in London I visited the doomed Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle to shadow an invertebrate survey with local entomologist, Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones. Led through the fencing by private security guards with gigantic German shepherds caged in the boot, we stepped out onto the parkland under the shade of cherries and mature London plane trees. The flicker of a butterfly’s wing caught my eye and Richard threw his net into the air. Looking at the contents we discovered a silver-washed fritillary. I could not quite believe it.

There is a sudden drop in temperature as I turn up the path, a chill wind skis across. In the shadows beneath boulders sits the remnants of yesterday’s snow. The spruce trees return, the snow thickening, slush on stone a recipe for serious injury. This is primary spruce woodland, or natural forest, formed without the helping hand of humans. However, the dominance of spruce lower down is due to the intervention of foresters (förster) in the first half of the twentieth century, as in England, when timber was needed to fuel either side of the world wars. It is telling – one of war’s casualties are woods.

From the boulders comes the drip of melting snow. Through the trees I see a large house that marks Groβer Falkenstein’s height of 1315m. A whisper passes through the highest spruce trees. A number of trees have been felled, the stumps cut with chainsaws. The ‘step cut’ in the stumps is still there, the torn wooden ‘hinge’ which the forester leaves intact and that helps guide the tree in the right direction when falling, throws up splinters.

I hear voices, laughter and that peculiar zenith-community that exists atop well-attended mountains of this kind. Four happy Germans appear to be double dating. I sit on a picnic bench by a cleared space of spruce, the scene hazy at best, the cloud cloaking the valley below. I hear a dunnock singing, a shy garden bird that instead nests in dense upland spruce plantations in this part of Europe. I eat some nuts and chocolate and head past a lady walking a hund, to the other side of the peak. The snow is deep, I clamber over spruce trunks to get to a plateau. One path back down has been closed due to nesting peregrine falcons. In London, 2014 holds 27 pairs.

I take a seat down on some soft, dead grasses, all around me are the dead and rotting stands of spruce said to have been killed by a spruce bark beetle outbreak. Many of the trees have been allowed to rest for fungi and other smaller, subtler wildlife, one of any woodland ecosystem’s most important aspects – the recyclers. I take it all in – the hazy folds of mountains, the glistening rooftops of immaculate Bavarian churches and towns. I head off and down through the spruce woods, under the song of the ring ouzel and firecrest. This path will take me to the realm of the lynx.

Introduction

In March 2016 I visited Białowieża National Park in Podlasia, north-east Poland. I must give thanks to Karolina Leszczynska-Gogol, Grzegorz Gogol and Izabela Sondej, without whom the trip would not have been possible. Białowieża is somewhere I have wanted to visit for several years after reading about it and hearing from friends (especially Poles) who had been there. It is described as Europe’s last remnant of primeval woodland (12-10,000 years old), a slight exaggeration recycled on social media and subsequently in news items. The Czech Republic has numerous stands of ‘virgin’ forest or woodland though not on the scale of Białowieża, which is probably the largest remaining tract of ancient European woodland due to the 5,000 hectare strict reserve which is said never to have been logged. But it is not the largest woodland in Europe, that accolade belongs to the Bavarian and Bohemian Forest complex on the border with the Czech Republic and Germany. We went to Białowieża at a time when the Polish government were rubber-stamping plans to increase forestry activity in the National Park and outlying woods, resulting in much opposition from environmentalists in the west and large demonstrations in Poland. The premise for increasing logging is to combat the spread of spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) which is currently impacting on Norway spruce trees (Picea abies) in the National Park. Those opposed to the plans argue that this is a natural process and that the beetle is a key species, a ‘forest engineer’. I agree, having seen the same impact in the Bavarian Forest National Park where some intervention does take place. I would argue that the impact of 20th century forestry practice has led to a proliferation of Norway spruce where there should be a more ‘natural’ balance of other species. However, keen not to criticise without having visited, we went there with an open mind.

The history of Białowieża

Białowieża National Park has key designations to protect its natural heritage. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve. The National Park was established in 1921 to offer protection to the herds of wild bison (Bison bisonus). Today Białowieża National Park is crucial because it has much of its original large fauna which can help ‘manage’ the landscape without any need for human intervention, i.e. logging. One theory of virgin woodland, established by Franz Vera in 1996, is that the dominant idea of endless trees covering northern Europe before humans arrived (we’ve been in Europe for over 40,000 years) is a myth. In fact wind blew holes in the wildwood and these glades were kept open by large grazing animals like elk, bison, deer and aurochs, meaning that the landscape was more like savannah or wood pasture – grassland dotted with trees. Vera argued that it was the human-enforced reduction and extinction of many of these large herbivores that led to the more dense woodland of the recent imagination. It also meant the larger clearings became towns and villages, settlements which were once established next to woodland (this is what ‘ley’ or ‘hurst’ means at the end of English place names). In Białowieża human intervention is evident in the landscape and has been for over 600 years.

Białowieża was ‘discovered’ by King Jagiełło before the Battle of Grunwald and established as his own hunting estate in 1410. He is said to have been awe-struck by Białowieża’s vast woodland and herds of bison. He later built a white tower to mark his hunting lodge. ‘White tower’ is what the area’s name translates to in English. The establishment of a proto-nature reserve in the early 15th century is a crack in the image of Białowieża as an untouched wilderness, however much the notion is recycled by us dewy-eyed environmentalists in the UK, distraught at the inexorable loss of our own ancient woods (‘at least we have countries like Poland’). Wilderness is also a misleading term, coined by John Muir at the advent of the American National Park system. That wilderness had been home to Native Americans for millennia, who also happen to be humans. Native Americans are responsible for the domestication of many crop species, including maize, which form large sectors of the global agricultural economy, the arch nemesis of wilderness.

Just outside Białowieża village at the site of Stara Białowieża, where King Jagiełło built his now lost white tower and established his hunting forest, is a trail of 200-500 year old pedunculate oaks (Quercus robur). Several of them are designated as protected monuments, fitted with red and white Polish emblems. These oaks reflect the reign of previous Polish Kings and the ancient boundary with the Kingdom of Lithuania. Many of these monarchs conducted hunts in Białowieża. In English, ‘forest’ means a place where forest law was enacted, largely related to the keeping and hunting of deer and the outlawing of poaching. In England today forests are areas of land managed for their timber almost exclusively. On the continent, ‘forest’ is used to describe almost all areas of woodland, also because, in places like Germany, France, Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania, woodland areas are often much larger than fragmented English woods. In Białowieża it feels natural to call it a forest, it is too big to be a ‘wood’. But what did people hunt?

In the 1400s King Jagiełło shared the forest with wolf (Canis lupis), lynx (Lynx lynx), European brown bear (Ursus arctos), aurochs (Bos primigenius), European elk, also called moose, (Elces elces), beaver (Castor fiber) and bison. Today only the auroch and bear are extinct in Białowieża, with the auroch’s final living animals dying out in Poland in 1627. The other species remain, several of them doing very well. Most of the brown bear populations in Europe are in mountainous areas that are not easily messed with by us, but the scale of Białowieża National Park (10,000 hectares) suggests a reintroduction could work. An attempt has been made in the past 100 years but the bears were hunted to extinction again. At least in other parts of Europe bears are now thought to be increasing as some countries urbanise and rural areas become depopulated. Romania is a case in point. They are also coming close to cities.

Bison once roamed much of Europe, they were even present in the woods of southern England. The bison found today in North America descend from the same roaming animals that crossed the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska before it flooded some 8-10,000 years ago. Bison were hunted to extinction in the wild by the successive impacts of the First World War (1914-18) and the Second World War (1939-45). They were saved from total extinction by a Polish breeding programme in 1929 that led to the bison being released again into Białowieża in 1952. The bison are now numbered in their hundreds and we were lucky enough to encounter two very warm days which seemed to attract the bison out into the fields to graze. The bison pictured above is a wild animal, photographed with a telephoto lens. It is clear that bison are coming in close contact to people and are even being fed by them. Bison are dangerous animals and should not be disrespected or approached. Unfortunately one local man operating on a little too much wódka had to be pulled away because he got too close.

The human landscape

The melding of Polish and Russian Orthodox culture is clear in Białowieża. At the entrance to the village we were greeted by a simple crucifix alongside that of the Russian Orthodox church. During the Napleonic War, dramatised in Leo Tolstory’s War & Peace, Napoleon’s armies allied with the Poles to defeat the Russians, but defeat for the French in 1812 meant that Białowieża came under Russian control. The Polish Kingdom was created but there were rebellions from the Poles when Orthodox Christianity and the Russian language was enforced. In response to the uprisings Podlasia was annexed by the Russian Empire and the Polish Kingdom was dully dissolved. The Polish language was outlawed and Catholic churches were destroyed or taken over by the Orthodox church.

Like King Jagiełło, the Russian aristocracy also fell for the wild woods and bison. Another Royal hunting estate was established though the Russians did not merely protect the bison but breed them so there would be enough for everyone to kill when taking part in hunts. Białowieża was now a forest in the truest sense, a landscape where wild animals were corralled and bred to be hunted by the rich. A private railway was established a few miles outside of the village which today is a restaurant where you can sample dishes of bison, boar, deer or duck. In 1915 the German army took control of Białowieża. They began to build small gauge forest railways and managed the woods aggressively, such is the impact of war. In 1917 the Russian Revolution meant the end of Czarist Russia and yet more instability for the people and wildlife of Białowieża. During the Second World War the Nazis occupied Białowieża, losing it again to the Russians. In 1947 the forest was split between Soviet-controlled Poland and Belarus. Poland finally became independent in 1989.

Though Białowieża is famous for its trees, one of the highlights for wildlife has to be the village itself. The Narewka, a tributary of the much larger Narew, runs through an area of marshland and reedbed in the centre of the village. This was a wonderful place to spend a few hours after the darkness of the forest, especially the more heavily managed areas of Norway spruce.

I was visiting with my friend and mondo-birder Peter Beckenham. Many of Pete’s favourite places are in the North Kent Marshes so he felt at home here. In Białowieża he showed me great grey shrike (Lanius excubitor) and snipe (Gallinago gallinago). At first I thought the snipe’s ‘drumming’ song was Pete’s phone ringing. It was a magical sound. I like to think I showed him myriad woodpecker species, like a Czar with a vast woodpecker estate.

There were several snipe marking their aerial territories over the marshland, while one, as can be seen above, stopped to rest on the top of a telephone pole.

The village itself developed from the clearance of the naturally wooded landscape. It is known as the Białowieża glade, a clearing that in its pomp was 1367ha in size but between 1953 and 1989 decline by nearly half. Woodland is gradually retaking areas of arable land which are no longer farmed. The farms and fields were some of the most interesting places to visit, not least the open air folk museum (above) which was teeming with toads (Bufo bufo).

There were signs everywhere of abandoned cottages, though neighboured by new developments of what appeared to be second homes for the Polish nouveau-riche. Tourism is evidently changing Białowieża’s village, and from an ecological point of view it could be for the better, but it could also be for the worse. North-east Poland’s traditional, old fashioned agriculture is key to the richness of its wildlife and habitats. If these practices are completely lost in favour of more intense agriculture as promoted by the European Union’s agricultural board (though conversely not by EU-wide measures like Natura 2000’s Birds and Habitats Directives) then many species which are stable and increasing in this part of Europe will become threatened as the traditionally-maintained habitats decline. Coupled with the threat of increased logging in Białowieża a worrying trend is apparent. Also, if local people can’t work the land in a traditional way and only the wealthy can afford to live there this will also contribute to habitat loss.

Nature protection

The allure of Białowieża for many is the 5,000ha strict reserve and believe me it is strict. This area of unmanaged, ‘untouched’ woodland is presented as the only remnant of Europe’s wildwood. Wildwood is a mythical forest landscape that thrived after the last glacial period came to an end 10-12,000 year ago, at the same time that bison were walking from Russia into North America. Glaciers covered much of the northern hemisphere until the climate warmed and the conditions became favourable for a greater diversity of tree species. First birch and pine, then hazel, oak and ash covered the UK and northern Europe. There are many misconceptions about the finitude of this landscape – I agree that it was unlikely to be trees coast-to-coast, as Franz Vera argued. There is little to no known remnant of wildwood in Europe and many of its species lost. As Oliver Rackham argues in Woodlands, our sentimentality regarding trees and woods has warped our sense of what is natural for trees, or even what the word ‘natural’ means. Our impact on the climate through the burning of fossil fuels and the unprecedented release of nitrogen dioxide, carbon dioxide and other pollutants that alters the chemistry of the soil, poisons us and a wealth of other species, means that there is no corner or square of this earth that is ‘untouched’ by us.

We visited the reserve at dawn. You can only enter with a guide having paid the entry fee or on scientific business, if you enter without one you can be fined. Wardens cycle around the main paths seeking to check permits at all times. This officiousness – our pass was checked three times – gave a sense of pressure to our visit but did not take anything away from the strict reserve’s grandeur.

The strict reserve manages itself ecologically – though there were plenty of signs of chainsaws cutting fallen trees across paths, so ‘truly wild nature’ had not escaped Health & Safety. Trees naturally succumb, fall and decay. Some remain standing to become habitat for fungi, plants and other invertebrates. One of the main attractions for Pete and I was the number of woodpeckers that could be encountered here. By the end of the trip we had seen 8 species.

One woodpecker that can be seen fairly commonly in east European spruce forest, if you give it the time and attention, is the three-toed woodpecker (Picoides tridactylus). It feeds on the larvae of the spruce bark beetle, the subject of much press attention in Europe currently. The three-toed woodpecker makes its way around the trunk of a dead spruce tree, pecking away at the bark to find its food. Evidently the deadwood created by the bark beetle is of great importance, rather than being the threat outlined by the Polish government. But is the threat economic or ecological?

Another woodpecker which I have rarely spent any time with is the lesser spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor). In England this bird is undergoing a speedy decline, having disappeared from its historical range and now confined to strongholds, including the New Forest. Its decline in the UK is not completely understood. In Białowieża we had the opportunity to spend a good half an hour with this bird alongside the Narewka as it picked its way around the tree. Before reaching the river we had seen the Syrian woodpecker (Dendrocopos syriacus), identifiable from the great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major) by a break in the black bar that connects its cheek from its nape!

Fungi is a friend of the woodpeckers in that it softens up trees for excavation. Fungi performs a vital role in woods, in breaking down dead trees, controlling the number of certain species and in creating soil and stable nutrients for other life to prosper from. It also helps trees by weakening and quickening the removal of deadwood that otherwise adds weight to a tree, inhibiting its growth.

Outside the strict reserve this hoof fungus (Fomes fomentarius) evidenced the role fungi has in offering direct nourishment to wildlife. I pray that this was bitten into by an elk but it was most likely a horse.

I’ve written before about beavers in Europe. In Białowieża’s strict reserve they are another ‘forest engineer’. You can even find them in Warsaw, a lesson for us in the UK as we get to grips with these returning beasties. The flooded woodland you can see here has been opened up and the river Orłówka broken out and slowed by beavers. This has a massive effect on the number of species found in wetland habitats. The smaller pools of water create breeding space for fish and many aquatic invertebrates, as well as for amphibians. The rerouting and channelling of European rivers – especially by communist or Stalinist agricultural schemes – was one of the most destructive environmental practices to have occurred in the continent’s history.

This is a multi-stemmed hazel tree which had been ‘felled’ by beavers. I love how similar this is to the hazel stools coppiced by volunteers in much smaller English woods. So it’s ok if beavers do it, but not us? I’m not so sure.

Pete was also impressed by the beaver’s work. They are able to sharpen their felling teeth with bottom front teeth that act as a kind of sharpening stone. They are evidence of the fact that sometimes cutting down trees can be a good thing.

The bark beetle battle

Tree felling is not always the right thing to do. Walking in Białowieża there were clear signs of spruce trees dying off from the impacts of the bark beetle. Trees with red dots or crosses with numbers marked in red spray paint indicated that they were to be felled.

The bark beetles do damage to trees when present in large infestations because they bore through the cambium of the tree. The bark is the protective layer for the cambium as well as the phloem and the xylum. Water travels through the xylum and sugars and other minerals pass through the phloem. These are the two most important cell membranes in a tree’s ability to feed and grow. There are many species of bark beetle, the above image is an ash tree and so I don’t profess to know if it’s the spruce bark beetle, it probably isn’t seeing as the spruce bark beetle family only feed on spruce or pine.

As mentioned earlier, deadwood is an intrinsic part of a woodland ecosystem. It provides habitat for thousands of species of invertebrate and fungus. Many managed forests completely lack any deadwood because it has been removed for sale or simply tidied up. Also the key plantation trees of spruce, pine and larch produce very view large branches, unlike oak or ash, and so there is little to even fall anyway. Recent research suggests that the removal of deadwood from woodland environments has contributed to climate change. This is because wood continues to hold carbon as deadwood. The tidying up of woods is one of the key ways to reduce its biodiversity, I hate to see it.

In the Bavarian Forest, on the border with the Czech Republic, the spruce bark beetle has also hit the woodlands hard. One of the possible reasons for this increase is the intensive forestry of the early 20th century, when Germany was at the forefront of two world wars. In wartime, woods suffer greatly. In the UK, the Forestry Commission was created in 1919 in response to the depleted supply of wood caused by the First World War. In Britain this meant a loss of ancient woodland, an irreplaceable habitat. In Germany war meant more spruce and pine, laying the groundwork for the outbreak of the bark beetle in recent decades. Before the Bavarian Forest’s intensive forestry work in the 1900s, the woods were made up of silver fir (Abies alba), beech (Fagus sylvatica), ash and a greater diversity of species. When the balance in stable ecosystems is disrupted some species can become invasive. Similarly, the outbreaks of Dutch elm disease in the early Holocene (12,000 years ago to present) were likely caused by our species opening up woods and allowing the elm bark beetle (Scolytus scolytus) greater range of travel to infect more elms with the fungal disease. Manmade climate change is also identified as a cause of the dying off of spruce due to drier soils, another reason why no landscape can be described as ‘untouched’ by us.

On our final day in Białowieża we came across the first signs of intervention from foresters. A nature reserve sitting between the road to Hajnówka and the bison show reserve had large areas of mature dead spruce that had been felled. Was this in response to the bark beetle, or was it a safety measure? We didn’t know for sure but it seemed beetle-related.

Earlier in the day, before being stopped by the very suspicious Polish border guards warning us not to try and escape to Belarus(!), we encountered a man gathering timber with his tractor. I snapped this picture of him, mainly because I am interested in how woods are managed in Europe and who they are managed by. He didn’t see me take that photo but when he saw me taking the photo below, having driven past us, he began shouting at us in Polish to go away. My general feedback has been that European foresters don’t like being photographed.

This is what he had been so worried about. We met a Polish birder around the corner and I asked why he had been so angry. ‘Perhaps he is stealing,’ he said. I wasn’t convinced of that. It could be that Greenpeace Poland’s visits to Białowieża to count the number of felled trees, along with their typically ambitious protests being undertaken in Warsaw, has caused anxiety and tension among forestry workers, many of whom will be doing only what they do normally. I sympathise with them.

In another area we noticed that wherever there was a felled tree, the words ‘eko szuje’ or ‘eko kornik’ had been daubed on the stump. We were unsure what it meant, but ‘eko kornik’ probably means ‘reserve of the bark beetle’. I would welcome any translations from readers! This seemed like an urban protest. But why are the Polish government so keen to fell spruce? Why do they care so much about the tree? It’s not threatened in Europe, in the Bavarian and Bohemian Forest’s case its presence is too great and it inhibits species diversity and only small areas of infected trees are being managed to reduce the beetle. In my opinion, having seen how much use the tree is for construction and carpentry in Romania, the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany, the answer is surely commercial. Patrick Barkham has written a very informative account of the issue, he takes it further: ‘They [those opposed to the plans] say the beetle is a handy alibi for commerce. Before Szyszko [the environment minister] (a forestry teacher) was elected, he spoke of the wasted commercial potential of unlogged wood. Only 57% of the proposed harvest refers to disease-ridden spruce – its rotten wood is worthless. Loggers want to get their hands on valuable, large old trees. One forest district has already almost felled an allowance of trees which was supposed to last until 2021 and so the government will permit it to increase its annual take from 6,000 cubic metres to 53,000 cubic metres. Other districts are likely to follow suit.’

If the opposition view is right and the Polish government is attempting to log old growth forest (400-10,000 years old) the EU, as Barkham points out, should stop them: ‘As Britain heads towards the EU referendum, virtually every conservationist argues that we need to stay in Europe because of its environmental protections, including the habitats directive and its Natura 2000 sites, of which Białowieża is one. Białowieża is the big test for that argument. The EU must intervene, cajole and penalise the Polish government until its vandalism is stopped. If the EU can’t save Białowieża, its environmental protections aren’t worth the – sustainably sourced – paper they are written on.’

Doing the right thing for Białowieża

I’m uneasy about the ‘save our woods’ rhetoric that is so common now on English-speaking social media. The ‘crying wolf’ of many campaigners has led to scepticism for things that really are important. Evidently there are serious problems in Białowieża. The main crux of the argument to protect it is that it’s ‘pristine’, ‘untouched’ and a wilderness. I don’t agree that it is. Białowieża’s woods and trees have been exploited and its fauna messed with by people for over 600 years and likely further back. If Białowieża is to be saved from these ecologically illiterate measures of clear felling deadwood, the argument should not be based on mysticism. Campaigns to save woods and landscapes should be built on a clear case that people can understand, not on a fairy tale that will later be picked apart through the bureaucratic process. I don’t think Greenpeace Poland are doing this but those of us English-speakers trying to raise awareness about Białowieża should focus on reason rather than emotion first of all. There is a reasonable case not to increase logging in Białowieża, so why not focus on that? If you really do love the idea of Białowieża and want it to be protected the best thing you can do is visit, to spend your money there, invest in the eco-tourism infrastructure and show the Polish government that its value is far greater as a nature reserve than as one to be infringed upon by exploitative forestry. The battle for Białowieża will rumble on as it has for centuries.

I live in an area of London that was once covered by a stretch of woodlands, commons, meadows and wood pasture that was called the Great North Wood. It was not the continuous wildwood which some argue had covered parts of England totally after the melting of the ice 10,000 years ago, before humans began to cut the trees down. It was known as the Great North Wood because it sat north of Croydon, a large market town fringed by chalk downlands which are not so hospitable to the kind of woodlands dominating the land to the north on London clay, namely hornbeam and sessile oak. On London’s open downlands livestock grazed and rabbits were bred for their fur and flesh. The wild but manipulated landscape of the Great North Wood would have stretched all the way north to the Thames at Deptford (where timber could be exported on ships or turned into ships), cutting off at Penge (Celt for ‘the end of the wood’) and slithering down a little like the continent of South America to Selhurst. Many of the placenames in the locality echo the woodland past, the history of its woodspeople, or the woodsman (which Ben Law neatly points out means ‘wood hand’ rather than excluding women). This can be seen most clearly by Norwood, derived from the name of the landscape itself, as well as Brockley which could describe a human settlement where badgers were notable. The ending of ‘ley’ generally means a clearing or settlement next to woodland. Honor Oak is a pointer to the Oak of Arnon Wood, a slab of probable millennia-old woodland which is now embellished by the Local Nature Reserve One Tree Hill, where the Oak of Honor stands in the form of an English oak replanted some 100 years ago after the site was saved as a public open space by dissenting locals in 1896. The lack of a ‘u’ shows that this is of the old English spelling for honour, the language taken to the Americas by settlers some centuries ago and now seeming somewhat alien or incorrect.

The Great North Wood was not merely one of endless woodlands or of wildwood, it was a landscape that humans were a part of and dependent on for their livelihoods. Some of the woodlands which remain today such as One Tree Hill and Sydenham Hill Wood, have shown that they were at times more open, that larger trees stood singularly with commoners grazing their livestock on the grasses and herbaceous plants underneath the shade of trees like elm, oak, hornbeam and ash. This before the advent of the enclosures when commoners had their rights removed through an Act of Parliament, a series of events which define the landscape of my hometown to this day. As recently as the 1950’s one of the Great North Wood’s most unaffected remainders, Dulwich Wood, was grassier and more open whereas today it is darkened by holly and an array of other trees such as hornbeam, ash, hazel and rowan. Still, the ancient remnants of the Great North Wood hold colonies of wood anemone, dog violets, wild garlic and other plants which indicate continuous woodland for at least 400 years.

Wood anemone indicates 400 years of continuous woodland

One of the main ways that people would have earned a living was by inhabiting the woodlands. Charcoal burning was one of the most common sights and vocations in the Great North Wood. They were known as the colliers, their presence indicated by Collier’s Wood in Wandsworth, beyond the western fringes of the catchment. Hornbeam was ‘coppiced’ on a cycle of 10 or so years, the trees cut at about 20-30cm, a vigorous regrowth the next year created multiple stems and thus an eventual greater crop to be burned and sold to blacksmiths and those needing intense heat to fire their craft. Other trees coppiced were hazel and ash, with hazel especially important for its usages for fencing and walking sticks. Sessile oaks were allowed to grow tall and true for their timber and the tannin residing in the bark. But coppicing is not necessarily as destructive or exploitative as it may sound, as when coppicing was more common – before the advent of coal and the increase in imports of cheaper fossil fuels from abroad – the Great North Wood’s coppices were home to populations of nightingales and nightjars, not least at Penge Common (now covering the famous Crystal Palace Park and the town of Anerley) where locals were said to visit at night to listen to the nightingale song, and there is some anecdotal evidence that the nocturnal music fuelled an increased birth rate. Coppicing allowed light into woods, enriching the herb layer of these woodlands, giving life to wildflowers such as dog violet which then supported the silver washed and dark green fritillary butterflies, as well as beloved primroses, now diminishing from the English landscape as ancient woodlands and hedgerows have been grubbed out and poisoned over time, feverishly in the latter part of the twentieth century.

A renewed interest in coppicing has given a new sense of purpose to our woodlands

This brings me to the issue of woodlands and biodiversity offsetting, a scheme mooted by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as a way to mitigate losses to wildlife from development. In recent times the former Transport Secretary Justine Greening advocated the ‘transplanting’ of ancient woodlands which are in the way of the proposed High Speed Rail 2 line intended to travel from London to Birmingham and then north to Manchester and Leeds in a final ‘Y’ section. More recently Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has confirmed his liking for proposals to clear ancient woodlands and plant 100 trees for every ancient tree that is lost. Both of these proposals fall flat after only a little research or, dare I say it, consideration. As Oliver Rackham puts it in his totemic ‘Woodlands’, ancient woodlands are not the place to look for ancient trees. Paterson is mistaken. What he is looking for might be something like Penge Common, or one of the other commons now gone from the Great North Wood. It is now only really in wood pasture or ancient hedge lines that you can find ancient trees. In ancient woodlands it is the landscape and ecosystem which is ancient. Paterson sells himself as a man in-tune with nature and the countryside, posing by fence posts and boasting of keeping badgers as childhood pets. His rhetoric suggests he is out of his depth.

Ancient woodlands are not the place to look for ancient trees.

Today ancient trees are loved, most in estates or arboretums where they are prized for their age and ‘wisdom’. In ancient woods, such is the diversity of life, many trees succumb to fungal infection, because fungi is another aspect of an ancient woodland. The life of fungi is in the soil, the mycelium, to be exact. The mycelium is, in some ways, the life force of woodland, passing nutrients back and forth between trees and soil, a little like the information superhighway I am using to publish this article. Fungi is as vital to human existence as trees, often described as ‘the third force’ after animal and plant life. So too are certain species of wildflower, insect, mammal and bird depend on ancient woodland ecosystems. We are talking about an environment that takes many hundreds of years to develop. This is why HS2 Limited’s desire to dig up the ancient woodlands (33 ancient woodlands are directly affected according to the Woodland Trust) and transplant them elsewhere is the thinking of people who should not be entrusted to decide on infrastructure projects that endanger ancient woods or natural landscapes. ‘Moving’ a woodland would not mean a big family moving from a big house to another. It would be the same as a city removing its hospitals and replacing them elsewhere without foundations or power to run the building and its infrastructure. The real point is that ancient woodlands, biodiversity, nature, these are hindrances to short-term economic gain, and in many ways, to this government’s ideological assault on the environmental sector. Biodiversity offsetting, on this level, is something those of us who love trees, woodlands and nature cannot accept or allow to occur.

One Tree Hill’s Golden Jubilee beacon attracted 600 people in 2012

But what does this have to do with the Great North Wood, or of woodlands that were not necessarily valued for their biodiversity and wildlife but instead for their produce? The failure of biodiversity offsetting is its inability to recognise the need that human beings have for woodlands int he environmental sense, the importance of access to green and ‘natural’ spaces. It fails to see the importance of place, let alone wildlife or biodiversity. Worst of all it is a signifier of our failure, not just that of politicians, to see that woodlands present an opportunity for a more simple and healthier existence than the one presented to many in England today. In Ben Law’s ‘The Woodland Way’, he outlines just how far the English have moved away from their ‘forest dweller’ existence, an era that would have dated back to the Great North Wood. Woodlands offer us sanctuary, food, the resources for infrastructure, a place for real learning – wood carving, coppicing, construction, food growing, fencing, tool use – and countless creative industries. Many people express the sense of belonging offered by time spent in woodlands. The woodland sell-off plans panned (but possibly remodeled to fit biodiversity offsetting) caused outrage in the UK and led to a 500,000 strong petition being delivered to the Prime Minister David Cameron. This was a worrying time – we learned then that this government do not hold the best interest of our woodlands at heart – but the public were able to send a unified message. The sell-off was not acceptable.

Biodiversity offsetting fails to acknowledge the importance of place

The Great North Wood is a case in point for people standing up for their woodlands in the shape of One Tree Hill, saved from enclosure by ‘the great agitation’, as it is known locally, when thousands rioted to protect it from enclosure. And then there is Sydenham Hill Wood, saved twice by local people, London Wildlife Trust and the Horniman Museum from plans for it to be developed for housing. I wonder how the battles would have gone if biodiversity offsetting was in place in those, both very different, times. Our woodlands are only safe when they are loved, ‘used’ and valued by local people. Sadly, it would appear that our woodlands are not merely under threat from invasive species and disease, but also from the short-termism, bravado and lack of thought from authority figures like Paterson. Though some woodlands have been around for more than 1000 years, even in a place like urban south London their national fate is at the whim of individuals looking only as far as 12 months into the future. But that is only the case if people do not speak out and challenge the ecological illiteracy of ancient woodland offsetting. Consider that the next time you walk through a wood in spring, when its wildflowers, birds and insects are flourishing around you. That place is only safe because you and the community value its sense of place.

Standing on the track leading into Devilsden Wood I look to the ground for dryness, somewhere that hasn’t been soaked by this perpetual rainfall. I see fallen ivy leaves that appear like cuts of leather when really they are crisp under foot. Dog shit, too, the new waybread for the modern ancient footway. I hate the stuff. My waterproof sheds its load onto my jeans and it’s wait and become cold or move and receive woodland raindrops, some chucked from the canopy of mature yew, ash and beech, some fifty feet up. When they get behind glasses, these droplets shock the senses.

It’s fungi season, the signpost of falling temperatures, not too cold but a shift from the sultry summer. I gawp at log piles with an explosion of mushroom caps, marked by striping and shapes that would define them to those who understood them. But still, I spy an oysterling appearing from a rotting trunk and feel that in two years of woodland obsession I have at least learned something about this magical animal that appears so fleetingly it could almost be through the fabric of time, a monitor on how we’re doing. Checking the sole of my boot again, we’re crap. I wipe it off in a mud puddle. The rain has not lessened. I head back out from the dark, autumn-beckoning woodland and onto the wet warfare of the Downs. The change in mind is clear, the atmosphere of a woodland changes you. It is not like the open land, so much a canvas for human experimentation, our impact on woodlands is never so clear as the plough’s to the open landscape. A woodland to all but a minority could have been in that state for millenia, before human time. The wood is a wild city, with nature’s social housing, swimming pools and fast food. It was our home once, too. There is the semblance of a summer out here, yellow rattle not yet rattling, knapweed funked-out in pinkish purple, even a bit of scabious. These wildflowers have something of January’s left over Christmas decorations about them. A car passes along the lane. Woodpigeons are striking through the rainy sky, turning their wings and bodies at an angle – to avoid the direction of the rain? – always as individuals. These birds cut several different figures in a year – hurried, panicked on the wing, or else male birds cutting arcs out of the sky as they display to females long into the summer recesses. Now they could be migrating, they could be hunted. Mostly they are gorging on elderberries outside my bedroom window.

On the Downs a flock of goldfinch are startled into the sky like pieces of a broken vase put back, its smash rewound and fixed. They sit in a small hawthorn bush and I look more closely. On the end of a branch, clear and possibly not so fearful of man is a juvenile, all grey on the head, interested in looking but unaware of the perils of being watched. My advances fracture them once more and I’m left with a snapshot of their escape into the landscape captured on my camera.